News

Joseph Serna, Los Angeles Times, May 3, 2016A bungled search for a $300 dashboard camera has cost the city of Santa Clara nearly $500,000 to settle a claim for ethnic profiling, city officials said Thursday. The city earlier this week agreed to pay $350,000 and an additional $149,000 in legal fees to Mohammad Moneeb, a border protection officer with the Department of Homeland Security, after Santa Clara police arrested him, detained his parents and searched his home for hours in 2014 looking for a dashboard camera that went missing from a car used by Moneeb's uncle, an Uber driver. Moneeb and his family, who are Muslim, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city and police, alleging that they were targeted because they are of Middle Eastern descent. Moneebs father also works for the Department of Homeland Security, said the familys attorney, Michael Haddad. If they had a good reason for targeting Moneeb they wouldnt have paid him or his family $350,000, Haddad said Thursday. I think we basically caught them.